Troy, New York - July 23, 2002 - STEP Tools, Inc., the forerunner in developing STEP and STEP-NC software solutions for the global marketplace, announced today it will hold a STEP-XML Workshop following the ISO STEP Meeting held in Stockholm, Sweden in mid-June 2002. The workshop will be held at STEP Tools' headquarters in Troy, NY on September 12 - 13, 2002. STEP (Standard for Product Data Exchange) is an international, comprehensive data standard for describing CAD design data and associated processes. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a language used to represent structured data (it does not define semantics), and is a subset of SGML (Standard General Markup Language).
At the recent Sweden ISO STEP meeting, significant progress was made in the area of mapping STEP to XML, and its was confirmed that the next edition of STEP (Part 28) will include a configuration language to define how STEP data should be mapped into an XML Schema. STEP Tools has shown important success in the value of a configuration language while working in conjunction with Electric Boat (Groton, CT). Electric Boat has produced a number of example XML Schemas for the shipbuilding application protocols (AP-216, AP-218 and AP-227).
During the STEP-XML Workshop at STEP Tools, members of SC4 (an ISO subcommittee who help define STEP standards) will participate and help determine technical standards for the representation of STEP data in the XML format. This team will formally present their ideas to the STEP community for consideration and inclusion in the upcoming second edition of Part 28.
STEP Tools has already developed solutions for processing STEP information in the XML format that are used to read AP-238 data into CAM/CNC systems, and an updated version of XML with new formats to query and update a STEP database.